The New Yorker:

The stock market’s record-setting run suggests Wall Street isn’t taking Donald Trump’s tariffs and threats seriously—but they are already harming the economy.

By John Cassidy

The White House’s tariffs have been well received, Donald Trump told Kristen Welker, of NBC News, last week, adding that the stock market had just hit a new high. Trump was right about the market, but he didn’t mention why investors were bidding up the S. & P. 500 and Nasdaq to unprecedented levels despite his threats, yet again, to impose punitive tariffs of up to fifty per cent on goods imported from all over the world: they don’t believe he’ll ever go through with it. Or, as the acronym that has become an article of faith on Wall Street goes, “taco”—Trump always chickens out.

After Trump first announced his global tariffs with great fanfare, in the Rose Garden, on April 2nd, the value of stocks, bonds, and the U.S. dollar plummeted. Within a week, he announced a three-month pause on his most punitive levies, which ranged up to fifty per cent. Trump’s adviser Peter Navarro said the Administration would use the ninety-day extension to make ninety new trade deals. When the period came to an end last week, just two deals had been reached—with the U.K. and Vietnam—and those were only rough outlines. Rather than let the tariffs kick in, Trump postponed them again, this time to August 1st. He also told reporters that this new deadline may be “not one-hundred-per-cent firm.” taco, taco, taco. That, at least, is Wall Street’s take.

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